Take a walk and cut down on your steak consumption to lose weight while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

That's the suggested "global warming diet," a new idea to combine climate-saving and waistline-saving initiatives for healthier people and a healthier planet. According to a recent CNN article, a new trend is emerging among public health and climate experts to tie the two problems together to find better solutions. If Americans adopted a global warming diet, the scientists and doctors suggest, then we could improve the obesity and climate change problems at the same time.

The global warming diet would entail walking instead of driving for half an hour each day and replacing some red meat in your diet with vegetarian choices. These efforts would theoretically cut United States greenhouses gases by millions of tons, and the U.S. is the biggest culprit for emissions by a long shot. The meat industry alone requires massive energy and land and is estimated to produce 18 percent of all American CO2.

Basically, the twin measures would produce twinned results. Eating less meat and walking more helps people lose weight, and approximately two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. But climate experts also say those two measures would mean less reliance on cars that emit C02 and less energy consumed by meat production facilities.

One of the doctors in the article says the best way for Americans to walk more is to leave the car home for one errand a day, like walking instead of driving to school. The idea is a good one, but I'm not sure how feasible it is until this country changes its growth and development patterns. The reality is that many American families live in suburbs far from stores, libraries, and schools--farther than a thirty minute walk, at least. And not all neighborhoods have sidewalks, making a walk to school with children unsafe for a large portion of the population. For those people who could implement the changes, though, I bet the benefits would be enormous--for them and for the environment.

The article cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health, The American Public Health Association, and the International Association for Ecology and Health.